Cursor launches an AI coding tool for designers

Indicator, wildly common Start coding artificial intelligenceis launching a new feature that allows people to design the look and feel of web applications using artificial intelligence. The tool, Visual Editor, is essentially a coding product for designers, giving them access to the same granular controls they expect from professional design software. But in addition to making changes manually, the tool allows them to request edits from Cursor’s AI agent using natural language.

Cursor is best known for its AI coding platform, but with Visual Editor, the startup wants to capture other parts of the software creation process. “The core of what we care about, the professional developers, never changes,” Cursor’s head of design, Rio Lu, told WIRED. “But in reality, developers are not alone. They work with a lot of people, and anyone who makes software should be able to find something useful through the cursor.”

Cursor is one of the fastest growing AI startups ever. Since its debut in 2023, the company says it has surpassed $1 billion in annual recurring revenue and has tens of thousands of companies, including Nvidia, Salesforce and PwC, as customers. In November, the startup closed a $2.3 billion funding round, raising its valuation to nearly $2.3 billion. 30 billion dollars.

Cursor was an early leader in the AI ​​coding market, but now faces greater pressure than ever from big competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The startup has historically licensed its AI models from these companies, but now its competitors are investing heavily in their own AI coding products. For example, Anthropic’s Claude Code grew faster than Cursor, reaching $1 billion in annual recurring revenue Just six months after launch. In response, Cursor began developing and deploying its own AI models.

Traditionally, building software applications requires many different teams working together across a wide range of products and tools. By integrating design capabilities directly into its programming environment, Cursor wants to demonstrate its ability to bring these functions together in a single platform.

“Previously, designers lived in their own world of pixels and frames, not really translating into code,” Lu says. “So teams had to create processes to hand off tasks back and forth between developers and designers, but there was a lot of friction.” “We’ve brought the world of design and the world of programming together into one interface with a single AI agent.”

AI-powered web design

In a demo at WIRED’s headquarters in San Francisco, Jason Ginsberg, head of product engineering at Cursor, demonstrated how the visual editor can tweak the aesthetics of a web page.

The traditional design panel on the right allows users to adjust fonts, add buttons, create menus, or change backgrounds. On the left, the chat interface accepts natural language requests, such as “Make the background color of this button red.” The cursor agent then applies these changes directly to the code base.

Earlier this year, Cursor released its own web browser that runs directly within its programming environment. The company says the browser creates a better feedback loop when developing products, allowing engineers and designers to see submissions from real users and access Chrome-style developer tools.